Beautiful Mess

I just started reading the book “Beautiful Mess” by Rick McKinley the pastor of Imago Dei Church in Portland. The basic premise of the book is that the Kingdom God has set up here on earth is a beautiful mess.  God has chosen to use us, broken, imperfect people to carry out his will and reflect him in this messy, broken world.  So while we might wish, when God saved us he chose to clean us up and make us totally perfect, but that’s not the way he’s chosen to work.

The insight I want to share today is what he said about studying theology.  He said he loves to study theology but he compares it to a scientist studying anatomy.

“It’s like cutting up a corpse to figure out what it means to be human — sure you’d end up with identifiable body parts… but the wonder of pulsing human life would elude you.  Do you think in some piece of brain you’d find clues to friendship and falling in love?”

He follows the analogy up like this: “You can study God expertly in His parts and miss Him entirely in His Being.”

His point is that we must be careful; that in studying God, putting God in our own terms, we can come to a place where we think we know God, and yet have failed to discover him in his essence.

I have been learning more of this point being fresh out of Bible College. So often you see students of the Bible (myself included) go through courses upon courses teaching us the parts of God, the parts of the Church (the Body of Christ), the step by step instructions of our Mission, and yet… many times we miss the simplicity and the beauty of this Loving God.  We learn and know, but fail to experience.

I want to experience God. I want to be diehard for his mission, not because I have learned all the reasons it’s the right mission to be on, but because I am totally sold out to this God I have experienced for myself.  It’s good to know.  It’s great to have knowledge.  But we should not sacrifice the relationship, the experience of God in our lives, for theological saavy.  As I’ve heard it said, “We are saved by grace, not by being the most right.”